Best Practices for PIC18 Stack/Memory Management?

The limited stack size of budget PICs is a problem area and I have adjusted my code to accommodate this reality. I currently adopt a rough paradigm of grouping closely related functions into a module and declaring all variables global static in the module (to reduce the amount of variables stored in the auto psect, and issues of mutability are only relevant in ISRs, which I account for.) I don't do this because it is good practice, but the reality is you have a finite amount of space to allocate all local function vars that exist in an entire project. In the embedded world of 8/16 bit chips, is this an appropriate method, provided I'm sure to take necessary precautions? I also do things like allocate > 256 bytes of RAM for Ethernet (I know it should be 1500 as standard MTU, but we have a custom situation and very limited RAM) buffers and have to access that memory via pointers so I can avoid the semantics of memory banking. Am I doing it wrong? My app works, but I am 100% open to suggestions for improvement. [c]